Home is where the heart is

Just a few months shy of my 13th birthday I returned to Czechoslovakia (as it was still known then) for the first time since my parents and I left four years earlier. I returned alone. I was often asked questions like:

"Do you feel Czech or American?"

"Where do you feel at home?"

Even as child, I sensed the questions were a set-up of sorts. The inquisitors must have known there are no simple answers. Still, when faced with inquiry, one probes one's internal space and strives to supply a coherent reply, if not for the inquisitor, at least for oneself.

The most satisfying one I arrived at was this: "Where my parents are, that is home."

It felt simple and honest. At least until I was 18 or so.

In the time Tom and I were trying to start our own family, those words returned to me, sometimes hauntingly. I felt how true they were: that love for family is the essence of home.  Now Helenka is almost one year old. Forgetting and forgiving their obviousness, now those words seem brilliant FOR their simplicity and truth. What surprises me about them is how much truer that phrase is now that I am a parent. Home is where the heart is. And the heart is in love with my husband and daughter. And where they are, home is.

Loneliness Transformed

Today Tom returns after more than 3 weeks away.  Three weeks is a long time.  A friend therapist of mine once described the process of having her husband away like this:  

"The first week feels pretty good; it’s fun to be on my own and feel independent.  The second week I start missing him.  The third week I am pissed off that he isn’t home, and when he asks 'how are you?' on the phone, I immediately think 'well, if you really cared, you would be here.'"

That seemed to capture the rough outlines of my experience too.  When I moved to DC to be married with Tom, I did it so quickly, I never considered that we’d be apart for long stretches like this, let alone how it would make me feel.  And, it turns out, it felt pretty bad.

This time I tried a different approach. I listened to my dear friend Anchi Mei who wrote this in one of her e-mails during my last husband-less stretch:

"You can and also make new friends and acquaintances and keep pursuing new relationships and create social connections wherever you are. But, I think the crying comes from a different, deeper place. And that sadness can exist alongside a  different happiness and peace with the friends who are currently in your life. And maybe one day it will dissipate.  Or maybe that loneliness will remain your most steadfast friend."

Ah, yes.  Those words were like a salve.  Anchi, like me, is an only child of immigrant parents.  We’ve known each other for 20 years, and in that time, have both had extensive flirtations with loneliness.  

“Of course! I can do this. It’s time to make friends with it.  I can’t be running away from it any more.”  I knew.

And so I did.  Every time I heard the voice that said something like “You are alone.  You should be with friends.  You should get busy doing something.  See, no one is calling you and asking you to hang out...”  I took a deep breath and let that thought go.  Let it dissolve.  Then I’d take out my drawing pad or the guitar and immerse myself in the aloneness of my experience.  And it felt great!  When people did ask me to hang out, I actually chose not to.  It felt rich to be alone.  Somehow it felt like that was what I needed.   I began to crave being alone.  

I talked to my boss, a self-proclaimed “zen guy” and the Head of our Episcopal School, about this experience and he gave me the word “solitude.”  I realized I was transforming loneliness into solitude.  And solitude felt nourishing.  

So today Tom comes home, and I am so looking forward to his arrival.  But for the first time, it’s a pure welcome without resentment.  It is with deep gratitude for this experience.

Birthday Party for One

Save the cards that arrived days before.  

Leave them unopened.

Pick up one gluten-free cupcake.

Ride bicycle home slowly. 

Savoring the warm air.

It may be the last of the year.  

Arrange cards, packages, flowers on the dinner table.

Throw together a salad.

Music.

Take it all in.

Flip through New Yorker.  

Savor the feta and chicken on spinach.

Wash it down with flat wine.

Finish with sweet chocolate-y cake.

Open the card from your dear friend, your teacher.

Her handwriting shows her age.

Her words her wisdom:

“Cherish each other and all that you do!”

Card from mom. Saccharine. Real.

Grandmother’s confession:

“I write how much I spent on bread and milk, but I haven’t marked the date of your birth, my only, my favorite granddaughter. I am ashamed.  I hope this reaches you in time.”

You cry. 

You wail for your grandmother’s decline.

Or is it for your loneliness?

Taking stock

Home.  That was the impetus for starting this blog.  The search for home.  We all know that it’s more complicated than at what address one lives.  And at last count, I’d lived at 17.  To that, I’ll add two more, and arrive at the address where Tom and I currently reside.  We have lived here for 2.4 years now.  It is our home.  It is what adults in this country strive for - to buy a home.  Each of us have already owned a property prior to this, a condo of some sort, but this free-standing house, with a garden, a driveway, on a tree-lined street, is the first and only one we bought together.  And although we’ve settled in with all kinds of mixed feelings and tribulations, it is our home.  

It is where we’d like to start a family.  Which brings me to the second aspect of home: family.  Beyond just an address, a physical space, there are the people who make up one’s home.  Sure, one can live alone, and feel at home.  Both Tom and I have done it.  But as a married unit, we are an intrinsic part of each other’s home.  We like that. 

And we’d like to expand.  Whether that means having our own or adopting, we’d like to stretch the boundary of what home means.  That is the journey we’ve been on for a while now, since shortly after we moved into this new home of ours.  I know from my previous 25 years of searching for home, that that journey is never easy or straight forward.  It is full of curves, hills, and plateaus.  And so it would appear it is with this: expanding the meaning of home to small individuals beyond Tom and me. 

Summer Solstice Manifesto

Summer & Winter Solstices are easily the most under rated holidays on the calendar.  How can we let the longest and shortest days of the year slip by without paying them proper respect?  Shouldn’t kids be running around the street with cups of lemonade and sparklers?  Neighborhood barbecues with music and fireflies flitting about in the darkening humidity of the late evening ? Maybe next year.

This year I celebrated summer solstice on my own, but sweetly.  I picked flowers from our garden and placed them on the altar along with dates and almonds as an offering.  I chanted Gayatri Mantra 108 times and then sat for some time.  The Gayatri Mantra is traditionally chanted when one lights candles, watches the sunset or the sunrise.  It is a mantra which helps focus the mind onto the light within us, and ask for its guidance.  

With two months of summer vacation stretching gloriously ahead of me, I asked for guidance on how to spend such precious time.  This is what came to me.

This summer:

I grow deeper roots

I blossom creatively

I become healthier and stronger.

Yes, corny, but it rings true with meaning.  And it becomes my summer solstice manifesto.  What's your summer manifesto?

Thanks a lot Lululemon!

“Yoga is my secret weapon for triathlons,”  says the Lululemon advertisement on the back of a Yoga Journal.  A woman lies on her back, presumably after having finished the Ironaman Triathlon in Kona, her hands cover her face.  We are led to believe that she’s been rendered horizontal by her exhaustion and joy at the completion of this feat.  A lei, race number and her plastic gift bag are strewn around her while a large white Post-It like index card sprawls over the bottom third of the ad with the following mantra: 

Bucket List #1: Qualify + Finish IM Hawaii.  Check and check.

Why does this ad repel me so?  

Yoga too has been co-opted in the name of competition and hyper-achievement.  It is not enough to wear a designer outfit for one’s asana practice, one must also run a marathon, bike 112 miles, and swim 2.4 miles all in pristine Hawaiian morning.  Only then, may one die peacefully and with a sense of achievement.  Yoga, will serve as band-aid for the joints, bones and muscles that will be pushed to carry one through, and perhaps soothe the exacerbated mind during months of rigorous training.  Thanks Lululemon!  

Just for the record, the purpose of what this ad refers to as yoga is to bring one enough flexibility and strength in the body, calmness of breath and equanimity of the mind, to be able to sit in meditation and achieve bliss without having to run up volcanoes or peddle around Pacific islands. Over time, one learns to experience this bliss in ordinary life, while doing the dishes, putting your son to sleep and driving to work.  

Put that on your bucket list.  It’s actually much harder than an Ironman.

Slapshot

Green fields of Ohio

manicured, rolling, perfect.

Stone villas, gates, fences

mansions in his eyes.

It was the time of Reagan and Gorbachev 

of Jack Nicklaus and Bohuslav Stejskal, Bob, my father.

So fresh and new was he 

in this land

green like the course that surrounded them.

Eyes blue and shining

through the beard laced with dust.

How many words did he know back then?

Brick? Stone? Mortar?

“Welcome to America!”

The golfer teed off 

flashing his perfect, straight, American teeth.

My father may have been startled

had he known the pro.

He stretched out a hard, calloused hand

He loved to play.  Loved to laugh.

And ignorance is bliss.

He took the gleaming stick

squared off 

right leg toward the target

wound up over his left shoulder 

and SMACKED

the best slap shot

any puck could’ve asked for!

Only this was golf

this was America

a land (as it turned out)

not too pristine

for a sense of humor.

by Barbora Bridle

06/2011

Westward

White box van

sails arrow highway

westward

New images flood the windows of our carriage

Lengths of land we’d never imagined

A great tusk arcing 

along the shore of the Mississippi

Red earth ripped open 

a sliver at a time

No words

just wheels hissing on pavement

Another move

We trembled

at our roots perhaps

though faces were poised

toward possibility.

The Pacific,

still, from afar

but Oh! the waves 

that would pummel us.

by

Barbora Bridle 

06/2011

Trikonasana (Triangle)

Like an ancient pyramid

solid and golden

aspiring to the heavens
I stand

spreading from foot to finger

an invisible lightning rod

a conduit

Life travels 

through its channels 

upward

outward
inward

Body and soul 

e   x    p     a      n       d 

to meet their Maker

at thousands of spaces

where subtle sparks occur

and I am 
according to ancient sages
aligned

I am healed

lifted from my contracted self

for moments,

breaths

until next time.

Anacosita ES - The End

Yes, an abrupt end it is. Four weeks I spent at Anacostia Elementary School. The experiences of that time are enough to give me a taste of what it’s like to teach in a downtrodden urban neighborhood. And enough to realize I would not be able to teach there the whole year and make it out on the other end with my health and sanity in tact.

I wrote about the violence and the disrespect amongst students and both were very prominent. Fights continued to erupt in the classroom and the hallway, usually as a result of taunting between the students. One was so bad that desks, chairs and furniture went flying around my classroom. I herded students into the hallway while one member of our class whacked furniture in the classroom with a metal frame of free-standing white board. That student got taken away for the day, only to be babysat by a special education coordinator, who had no idea what the child had done. No one called his house. There was no follow up beyond me calling mother and trying to prepare the students for reintegrating him into the classroom the next day, requesting that they not call him “psychopath.”

We did have a nine day streak fight-free. According to observers familiar with the school, this was a record. Unfortunately, skirmishes continued in the following weeks, and I continued to feel unprepared for handling them and their fallout. Our school had no particular protocols in place for such situations. When I asked the principal, I was informed that I should not call upon the security guard to break up a fight, nor was I given any other alternate solutions. Trying to deescalate a fight between two impulsive, hyperactive ten year olds is nearly impossible. No time outs, talk with principal, detention or in-house suspension as a form of consequence was available. All these issues were to be handled by classroom teacher. The classroom teacher who is expected to teach rigorous academic material, for which the students are not, as one might imagine, prepared.

I am happy to say that in the four weeks I did notice a difference in each of my students. Even those most destructive, most unreasonable, the ones held back, the ones ostracized by the whole, responded to me by initiating unexpected conversations, showing concern about their behavior contracts, obeying my requests to “please sit down” even if it was after the seventh time, by raising hands and trying to participate and simply by making eye contact or saying hello. There were glimmers of hope with each one, and I felt proud to see their investment in their education. It was uplifting.

Unfortunately, these glimmers were not enough to uplift the colossally malfunctioning system into something manageable and forward moving. In the end it was not the children, as crazy as the stories about them are, that made me want to leave the job. The part that seemed far less likely to change was the administration, the top-down issuances of mandates, scripted curricula, required bulletin board displays, micromanaged time segments, and the constant threat that someone would come in to check teacher’s degree of compliance with all of the above and “write them up” was really too much to bear.

Ironically, teachers were treated in exactly the same way bad teachers teach their students: without listening, caring, explaining, providing rationale or getting their “buy in.” The administration was the sage on the stage, the very paradigm which effective teachers try to steer away from.

It is too bad really. After ”experts” spent years analyzing what makes a good teacher, and evaluating an effective teacher’s impact on the classroom, such teachers are making their ways into many underperforming classrooms that may have been neglected. This effort may still not yield the results its proponents are hoping for because it takes more than just a good teacher to reform a classroom, let alone a school. Good teachers may be the bricks of a successful school, but the administration and support services, the soundness of norms and expectations, the consistency of procedures, the caring and investment of and a collegial atmosphere among its adults are the mortar. Both are needed for the building to stand.

Teachers can not be, exceptional human beings who make extraordinary sacrifices at great personal cost for the good of society. Or at least this one can’t.

Anacostia Elementary School (all names have been changed)

Week one of teaching in Anacostia. That is the southeast part of the city. The “bad” part of town. There is really no other way to say that.

I knew that, going in. I knew about the abysmal reading and math scores, only 15% of the children at grade level. I only vaguely sensed the ugly reputation such schools had and dared not imagine the reality on the ground. Even if I had dared, I don’t think I would have been able to imagine a real Anacostia school.

Our school has an almost entirely new teaching staff. Only three teachers from last year remain. All the students are black and so is most of the staff.

I wonder what it feels like for the kids to come back to a school full of new teachers. Right now it seems like a struggle between us and them. We are wrangling for authority over the turf. Who is winning?

Hard to say. By 2 pm, in my class, the kids have definitely won. They’ve outlasted, outscreamed, outcussed, outfought, and in some cases outrun me. Nothing would have prepared me for their tenacity for off task, off focus, and appallingly rude behavior.

Common forms of communicating, at least among the fifth graders, are slurs such as “you African bootie scratcher,” “crackhead”, “faggot”. “I’m gonna steal you!” is their favorite promise. “Penis” and “vagina” are some of the most commonly named body parts. “Shut up!” is their favorite command.

It’s a rough crowd. Day two was my first encounter with a fist fight. I have never seen a fist fight in real life before. Not amongst teenagers - if there ever was a fight in high school, I certainly had no interest in being a witness. And really, after that where would one see a fist fight? A bar? A party? I never had the privilege. Not until my second day at Anacostia Elementary. On the way back from lunch, two boys started to fight, for no apparent reason, right in front of me. I tried to hold each one by his arm, and separate them - since they are little twigs that come up to my waist. But they are squirly little guys, and kept pursuing each other. It didn’t help that about half of the class was shouting “fight! fight! fight!” with their hands cupped at their mouth. Once one of the boys broke loose, I had to let the other one go so he could defend himself, and I sent one kid to go get a security officer. In the meantime, a pile of punching and kicking scraggly arms and legs was wriggling on the floor. When the massive security officer heaved herself upstairs, each one of us was able to restrain one kid. I can’t quite describe how inwardly shocked I was at that incident. That night I had some doubts about this job. I didn’t sign up to be a correctional officer! I cried, and felt sick, and wondered what the hell I got myself into.

I wish I could report that day three was better, but it really wasn’t. I had to restrain one of the boys again, from picking a fight with a different boy. At least I was reassured, that it wasn’t just me, since one actually pursued the other after school even in front of the pursued boy’s father. Father started to chase the enemy boy and fell down. Next day, pursued boy was transferred to another school.

Day four was a little better, largely because there were two of us in the room. A special education teacher comes one and a half days per week to assist with the five special education students in my class. That day we taught them compliments. The kids came up with a list of compliments they could give each other (and it couldn’t be “I like your hair” or “I like your shoes.”) Then we went around the room and each complimented someone, while the recipient said “thank you.” That was the most positive atmosphere we had in class yet.

Day five I had several kids join me for lunch in my room. They brought up their trays with their school lunches; we sat around a table and got to know each other. I found out that Marco has been going to Anacostia Elementary for 8 years, because he’s been held back twice. A very sweet kid. I found out three of them consider Redskins to be “their” team, while one considered herself a Steeler and another a Raven. We all found out that the reason why Marco’s right arm is shorter and limper than the left is because “they took a nervous from his shoulder” and put it in the lower part of his arm. When one of the girls sought clarification about the “nervous” part, wondering if perhaps it wasn’t a “nerve” that was replaced, Marco pointedly retorted “hey, is this your arm?” It was a very lovely lunch.

You see, many of them are sweet. And I think they like me. But the few that aren’t “sweet” have an amazing capacity for causing mayhem. It’s hard to imagine what they have been used to in a school. We have a looooong way to go. It would be great if students wouldn’t raise their hand and request to step outside to remove a wedgie (I didn’t even know how to spell that word!). It would be great if they didn’t chase each other inside the classroom at full speed, or walk out of the room without permission. It would be great if they would acquire the discipline of working on something, being successful and feeling good about themselves. It would be great if they would be kind to each other. It would be great if they would understand the purpose of school, of learning. And I think we can get there. But man, it’s going to be a loooong road.

In My Room

I am sitting in home central, home base, quintessential home. I have lived in this house for eight years, four in high school, and four after college. The only place I've lived longer, was in our first home in Czechoslovakia, the first ten years of my life. In this house my room faces west, and always had wonderful afternoon light.

A pencil sketch of Tom Cruise which I drew in Junior High, hung my wall, later to be replaced by one of Jim Morrison. I built a life sized, paper and chicken wire tree in the corner of the room, and wallpapered one wall with National Geographic photos, and another with a snowy scene mural of Mt. Ranier. A desk was by the window, a bed in closet converted into an alcove, a garage sale bookshelf painted white, and a gifted wicker chest of drawers, which is still elsewhere in the house. It was home.

And yet it wasn’t. We moved into this house just before my 14th birthday. By then, five moves through three countries and two states, over the course of five years, made “home” somehow less meaningful. I had been uprooted so many times, that I had lost the will, or desire, or ability to grow roots. I had forgotten what home really means and I stopped looking for it.

Now the room is pink, a color I would never have chosen back then, and a light olive green. A lovely combination. A painting of a bowl of white peaches that my great grandfather did, hangs on the wall next to a solemn etching of Jesus’ face. There is also a pencil drawing of my mom which I did in high school. As a model I used a black and white photograph of my mom, which was taken in Czech Republic when I was young, and it was home. Mom is in her early twenties in the photo, her hair is short and permed. It’s a three quarter profile, and she looks at the camera with a smile and a sparkle in her eye, so characteristic of my mother. Her left hand supports her chin, with the index and middle fingers framing her Sophia Lauren lips. Her simple, gold wedding band shows.

There is a colored pencil drawing of a Mongolian horseman which I drew in college. He is riding through an Asian steppe, with right arm extended toward the sky, urging on his animal. Another painting is an oil canvas I started five or six years ago, based on a photo I took in Honduras. A beach scene on the island of Roanoke, where the slave ships landed, and a black community has lived ever since. There are no black folks in the scene. Instead, white laundry hangs between two palm trees and is lifted by the wind. I see it as unfinished but also surreal.

Three photograph collages also hang on the walls. These are not my product, rather that of my mom. A collage of black and white photos from the home we had in Czechoslovakia: great grand parents, grand parents, friends, vacation on the Balaton Lake (or Sea as we called it), me on my fourth birthday, and my ninth. The other two collages are much more recent - from the last ten years: birthdays, weddings, visits from the Czech Republic, mom, dad, grandma, friends, dogs, me. My parents’ recent divorce detracts from the happiness conveyed by those photos.

Next to the collages, and in contrast to their multitude of stories, is one large photograph. Two faces, two sets of shoulders, two pair of eyes looking into the camera lens. Tom and I on our wedding day. So content.

The furniture has been replaced with a more mature version of itself. The twin bed has become a queen. Across from it is a couch I purchased for my own house three or four years ago; the first real piece of furniture I bought at a real store, not a sidewalk. It, a chest, a cabinet and a coffee table remind me of another home, my home, the one I own, and lived in for four years. The one in which I metamorphosed into an adult.

It’s all here in this room: many homes, changes, people and loves. Here they collide and coalesce, hang out together, the bits and pieces from my life: a testament to the constant metamorphosis of what home is, and its stillness too.

Home is where?

Almost four weeks I have been “home.” The use of quotation marks is warranted by the fact that the quest for home still continues, still being examined, still being defined, because home is not a static, geographic place.

In the most general sense, this is home: the place where my husband and I mostly live (when one or both of us isn’t away), where most of our mail arrives (sometimes it goes to our PO Box on L Street), where we have most of our stuff (some of it resides in storage on H street), where we cook familiar food, and know the exact position of the shower knob which determines the perfect water temperature for our bodies, where our closets smell like us. It is where we know the noises on the street, and feel comfortable going anywhere. Where we feel comfortable. This is home.

In recent days I’ve been waiting to hear from potential employers about job interviews I’ve had. I am hoping to hear from a school with an offer of a teaching position. While I wait, I feel anxious. I check e-mail, phone way too often, the way one does in an obsessive relationship. I keep waiting. Various mental deadlines I hopefully established, have passed with no words. Tom is still in Pakistan and I miss his physical presence helping me to feel grounded and normalized. The anxiety has pulled me out of myself, and therefore out of feeling comfortable. And even though I sit right in it, in these obsessive moments, home feels distant.

Last Days and the Problems of Pakistan

My Islamabad days coming to an end. This has very much been on my mind: the process of conclusion and preparing for the next phase. It seems that I am not the only person concerned with my departure; others are aware and want to talk about what this means.

My hairdresser, a foreigner who’s been working in Pakistan for five years, asked about my experience in Pakistan. After I shared he asked “but aren’t you going to miss having people do everything for you? The driver, the cook, the cleaners... When I go home, I really hate having to clear the dishes from the table.” When I explained we had someone come to clean our house twice a week he exclaimed in his hairdresser’s animated best “You did not have the full Pakistani experience! That’s the best thing about living here! You can have someone do everything for you!” Indeed you can.

Our guards found out that I am leaving. “I know it’s your last day in Pakistan, madam.” said Haider Rahman after he handed me the receipts from the laundry. “Madam, I have a request” he looked away in the manner of a 10 year old boy who got in trouble on the playground. He waited until I urged him to continue. Then pointing at the other guard seated a few feet away “Madam, me and my friend live in Pakistan.” Hmmm... where is this going? “We live below poverty line.” Again he looked at me, waiting for a cue. “Can you help us out Ma’am, so we can build better our family’s house or improve the education of our cousins?” Oh... I see. “No. I can not give you any money.” I did not apologize. “It’s OK, Madam, never mind” he said smiling bravely and backing away from me. Perhaps I was too abrupt.

The woman who comes to clean our house, is same age as I, has two children, drives a car and speaks English unusually well. Janniaz, one of the driver’s has observed that our “female servant is very rich.” Rehana knows our time in Pakistan is drawing to a close and has asked me several times to recommend her to other foreigners, “to anyone [ I ] know at the embassy.” Like most Pakistanis she overestimates my sphere of influence. She likes to share with me about the problems of her country. She told me about a disabled neighbor boy who can’t go to school. “Please, Barbora, tell people on your project that we need to get education for these people. He has not even a chance to be a sweeper. Nobody wants to take care of him.” When I expressed frustration about the frequency of loadshedding (power blackouts) she informed me that “this is the VIP area and loadshedding happens regularly. In area for normal people power goes off any time of day, for long periods.” Last week we had brown water coming out of our faucet, and again seeing my frustration she explained that at her house “now in the summer time there is very little water from CDA (capital development authority). So we call water truck and buy from him water for one week for 900 rupees (about $12, and about what Rehana makes in the 3 hours she cleans for us). This water is only for washing ourselves, our clothes and dishes. I have to be careful about using it. I don’t do laundry very much.” This week she shared about another “main problem in Pakistan” not related to education or power or water issues. I suggested that Rehana gives her phone number to the real estate agent who brings people here now to show the house. Maybe some of his clients could use her services. “No, Barbora, I do not want to give my phone number to any Pakistani man. Pakistani men are always bothering Pakistani women. Now you are leaving and I can tell you. Like that man next door who is always staring at me!” she pointed frustrated toward the house next door. I knew exactly whom she was referring to. The driver from next door, who aside from one or two errands a day, and the bi-daily car wash, does nothing except squat on a grassy lawn in front of the house, or loiter in front of our gate and stare into our windows. “Every time, I wash the dishes, he is always looking at me. When I get out of the car, he is always looking at me, and he bothers me when I walk by him. Pakistani men think they can treat women any way they want. I do not want to give my information to any Pakistani man. They would bother me and my family. That is the main problem in Pakistan.”

Right now, apparently, the biggest problem in Pakistan is Facebook. Protesters are out in front of the Parliament, not demanding clean drinking water, electricity for their homes, or education for their children. They are demonstrating against sacrilegious imagery on Facebook (which only 1% of Pakistan’s population uses). Perhaps this is the main problem in Pakistan.

Eight Days

Eight days left of my stay in Pakistan. In eight days, it will be exactly 5 months that I’ve been here with Tom, and it will also be when I will return to the US.

Only eight days left, to conclude one chapter in life, one chapter of our marriage. Such transitions are important, and should be commemorated, marked somehow. Sure, one can throw a party, but there must be other ways to prepare us for the end of one cycle and beginning of another? Without marking or acknowledging these transitions, our life would be like one long canal carrying water from point A to point B. But life is much richer and more complex, and hopefully in the process of getting from point A to point B we change and transform who we are; from a brook, to a stream, to river which merges with larger and larger rivers, until finally it becomes the ocean. I like this metaphor, because it implies that we get bigger. We get more expansive. As we navigate each life change, we are able to grow and expand. Also, like the water, we become deeper and more still.

In the eight days still left in Pakistan, while I continue to recover from typhoid fever, I shall mark the end of one chapter and prepare for the next.

Call to Prayer

“Allahu-akbar!” (God is Great!)

The call to prayer. Oddly, one of the things in Pakistan that have brought me comfort. “Oddly” because I am not Muslim, nor Christian, nor religious for that matter. But there is a certain quality to the call, the muezzin’s voice inviting and pleading at the same time.

It inspires a similar feeling to one I had years ago while in Oaxaca for a summer. Dealing there with bouts of illness, loneliness and various existential crises of the mid twenties, I sought solace in churches. The silent, cavernous structures, brought me peace and stillness. I had been brought up areligious, atheist, and this behavior, these experiences were incongruous with my upbringing. And yet they brought me solace.

There is, in the heartfelt call to prayer, in the solemnity of a church, something that grabs at me. Something that grabs, right at the center of my chest, and says: this is home. This is home. And the breath gets pulled inside by my lungs, almost involuntarily swirling right into my core, expanding and resting there. And for a brief moment, just before the exhale, I know: this is home.

Baba Nityananda, a holy man of India, once said: Heart is the the hub of all holy places. Go there and roam in it.

I can’t quite roam there yet. But I can steel glimpses.

“Allahu-Akbar!”

The muezzin’s voice carries from an amplifier just a few feet from our windows. It is an invitation to pursue the breath into the center of my being, and there find home, just briefly catching the holiness of it. And then I exhale. It is an invitation I did not expect from Pakistan, the invitation to my own heart.

Diagnosis

It feels like a long time ago since I felt happy. Really carelessly happy, about nothing in particular - the best kind of happy. It’s been so long, that I can’t really remember it. I mean my body can’t remember it.

It has also been weeks since the temperatures have been around 100F, with the unrelenting sun beating down from morning till night, with the occasional sweetness of rain as reprieve from its intensity. Knowing that this is only the beginning of summer, doesn’t help. There is no escape from the heat, not the air conditioned mall or movie theater, nor the breezy beach. Only turning on the wall mounted air conditioning units around our house cools of certain rooms.

It has been a long time since I felt well. Reliably, well. For weeks I have been like a slug: thick, slow and sad. The inside of my head feels hot and heavy. Sometimes there is a sharp pain behind my eyes. I’ve had fevers and chills and night sweats and cramps and bloody noses.

So many things in Pakistan have been so unfamiliar and so jarring, that even these symptoms I took as par for the course. When hearing my health woes people would even say “I felt like that the first six months I was here”. “Really?” I’d feel the urge to ask “because that sounds pathological!” I mean why do that to your self? For so long? For what? Because Pakistan needs you? Or because you need Pakistan? In the short amount of time I’ve been here, it has been very hard to understand people’s motives for being here. To help? To have a story to tell? To use their skills where they are needed? To have something to do? To have a Pakistan on their resume? To have a job? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes to all of the above. All legitimate and valid reasons. But put up with six months of illness for any of them? That’s pathological.

I just want to be better. That is all my sluggy brain can manage to wish for. I want to feel better. I want to feel well. I want to feel healthy again and remind myself again what it’s like to feel good.

I think I am on my way. A second round of testing of blood, urine, stool, and an ultrasound finally showed that I have typhoid fever. Though we suspected it, first blood and urine came back negative so we feared it might be something weirder. After first course of antibiotics I still had 102 fever, still the night sweats, cramping and chills. The typhoid diagnosis brought a relief of sorts - knowing what it is, that it is treatable and a specific antibiotic for it, all made me feel good. But still, it has been weeks since I’ve been well, since I’ve been happy and in that time feeling like a slug has worn on me.

It seems like it might take a while to slither my way out.